... in the developed world, which already has a massive installed
base of desktops and laptops, bigger screens are still extremely
important. And they are likely to remain so, even when everyone
who uses them also owns a smartphone and tablet.

The strong part of that argument is that mobile devices will
likely become so advanced that they won't need a special
mobile-optimized ecosystem to function. They'll just handle the
web like laptops do, and the whole mobile problem will solve
itself: Phones will simply be small computers, and publishers
will not need to adjust their tactics.

The weak part of that argument is that if Henry is wrong and
mobile does become the dominant way news is consumed by
readers, we could all lose our jobs to an as-yet-unidentified
mobile competitor that is better at publishing in the new medium.

So here's the alternative universe, in which mobile is
the dominant factor for publishers.

Henry begins his argument with a compelling but misleading piece
of anecdotal evidence, this photo of our office, in which "there
is not a single person in the newsroom whose primary office
device is a smartphone (or even tablet)":

Henry
Blodget

This is a bit like taking a photo of a bus station and concluding
that there is not a single person whose primary transport device
is a car. (Besides, if you look closely you'll see that the
nearest desk has an iPhone 5 on it in front of the
computer keyboard!)

While "we" may indeed work all day like this, billions of people
do not, especially in Asia and Africa, which is where our
long-term readership growth (and the ad dollars attached to them)
will come from. In those geographies, the dominant "computer" is
the mobile phone.

The photo also doesn't account for that huge chunk of the Western
world that no longer works near a "computer" on a desk. Walmart
is the U.S.'s largest employer -- I'll bet its staff don't check
the headlines on their laptops mid-shift. JC Penney is switching
its entire checkout staff to iPads. Most large drug companies
have supplied their entire salesforces with tablets. There are
hundreds of companies doing something similar. We need to serve
our readers, not hope that our readers' devices can figure out
our product.

eMarketer

What do 30 percent of our readers really want?

Next, Henry notes that about 30 percent of BI readers see the
site on phones or tablets, but that "the idea that we would
suddenly drop everything and design Business Insider for, say,
smartphones first just doesn't make any sense" because
70 percent are still on computers, and we use all our gadgets in
conjunction with each other.

This is a familiar argument, based on a truism about the history
of media -- that each new technological medium adds to the total
media ecosystem but never fully kills off the incumbent media.
Thus, radio didn't kill newspapers, TV didn't kill radio, the web
didn't kill TV, and so mobile won't kill the desktop.

Fine. But the one thing you hear over and over again if you talk
to people in the mobile ad business is that mobile right now
"feels" a lot like the web did in 1996: A huge amount of new
money is pouring into the sector; the sector is still unproven;
the big money is still in the older media; but the tide is
shifting in favor of the new. During that time, it was common to
hear newspaper publishers proudly proclaiming that 30 percent of
their readership (or some similar proportion) was now on the web.

The lesson of media history is that you don't want to be the
incumbent, you want to be the challenger.

Follow the money

So now let's look at the economics. In May 2012, Facebook didn't have a mobile ad business. By
the end of the year, a majority of its users accessed Facebook on
mobile, and its nascent
mobile ad business could book $340 million in sales when it
reveals its Q4 earnings.

Google is an even more instructive example. It
now has an
$8 billion run-rate from mobile ads, which would be good news
if it wasn't causing a deceleration risk to its sales curve, and
cannibalizing 2 percent of its desktop business. (It's a similar
story at Pandora.)

The reason mobile is both a growth factor and a threat at Google
and Facebook is that mobile ads are cheaper for advertisers than
web display ads are. Supply and demand aren't yet hiking prices
on mobile the way they have on the web -- but I'm guessing that
both companies are going to figure that out.

Henry believes this is a false dichotomy because Google on
smartphones is basically the same thing as Google on desktop.
Well, kinda. The two experiences are different. But the mobile
experience is often more useful to users than the desktop one is.
When you search on your phone, you're often looking for something
with a geographic component. Who hasn't used Google Maps on their phone to find the nearest
Starbucks?

Currently, Business Insider lacks a mobile news localization
strategy. We may not need one -- business is international, after
all. But we don't yet know that we don't need one. And
it's not implausible to imagine a world where readers might want
news tailored to their zip code. In that world, the mobile
competitor -- reading its users' device locations before serving
information -- will win. (And ad prices for impressions delivered
by location are more expensive than raw impressions, for obvious
reasons.)

Mobile is social

News publishers know that Facebook and Twitter are our new overlords. We syndicate
headlines into their ecosystem through likes and tweets. A huge
chunk of our traffic, and thus the revenue generated by that
traffic, comes from social sharing.

A majority of users now access Facebook and Twitter on mobile
devices. And there's a whole new ecosystem of semi-social
mobile-only apps that do the same. Again, it's easy to imagine a
world in which a majority of our readers do with us what they're
already doing on Facebook and Twitter.

News, like Facebook, is about what's happening now,
after all. And if there's one thing you use a phone for, it's to
find out about something now. News and mobile are going
to walk hand in hand like high-school sweethearts. In fact, news
often finds users through Facebook and Twitter a lot faster than
it does through The New York Times or Business Insider.
There's a reason it's called the "News" Feed.

There's no law that says the news media as we know it has a right
to stay in business as the dominant provider of current
information.
The Times' revenues are still in decline, and have been for
years. Twitter already syndicates more headlines each day than
Bloomberg or Reuters combined.

And Facebook's business -- selling ads against that feed -- is
already lot bigger than The Times' ad business.

The medium is the message

I still subscribe to hand-delivered New York Times on Sunday
(don't ask). Each week, I wrestle with a broadsheet that just
won't fold back on itself without turning into a crumpled mess. I
have to wash my hands after reading it to get the ink off.

My wife reads the same thing on her iPad and has none of these problems. Plus, she
doesn't pay for it.

Clearly, this is ridiculous. But it illustrates how inherent
structural differences between media technologies change the way
news is consumed. The web, obviously, morphed page-turning
readers into point-and-click readers.

But on tablets and phones, it may be the swipe, not the click,
that is the dominant structural difference. That would suggest
that the winners in mobile news will be the providers that best
utilize swiping.

Business Insider, obviously, is a click-based site. Is this a
battle we are going to win? Again, we don't know. But we can't
assume that clicks won't go the way of ink.

Are we on the wrong devices?

In
2012, Apple's sales of iPads, iPhones and iPods (non-Mac
computer devices) far exceeded its laptop and desktop Mac sales
in both dollars and units shipped. Given that Apple is no longer a "computer" company -- it's
now a mobile device company -- why would a publisher bet their
business model on a product best displayed on computers, the
dwindling share of Apple's business?

What Henry's office photo also doesn't show is that every single
computer in our newsroom is an Apple -- and they're all desktop
or laptop devices.